A sequel to this sequence I did a few years back: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/30297008/

The idea of ugly creatures doing cute things amuses me. You know what else amuses me? The idea of Barbara, the Barbarian Princess, continuing her quest even after the evil Teensy Magician turned her into a frog. She"s so badass she doesn"t let a little transmogrification get in the way of her adventures.
After I started thinking about that, it occurred to me that most of the enemies you face in the second world of the game are toads. Putting two and two together, I came up with this. Barbara might be able to deal with dragons, monsters, and tiny wizards with dark spells, but she"s not quite sure how to deal with the normally aggressive Toad Warriors being so accommodating to her. It"s frankly put her out of sorts. But I"m sure she"ll figure it out sooner or later.

Barbara was drawn completely freehand this time. I had only her helmet and axe that I could use for an exact reference, but I had to use a handful of sprites to sort of figure out not only what a unique pose would look like, but also how that unique pose would look like if Barbara were a frog. And you know what? It works. I mean, she looks surprisingly good. I"m sure a more skilled artist than I could tell me what I did wrong with it, but it"s really at the upper limit of my abilities for freehand drawing.
The toad is semi-freehand. There"s no sprite of the toad in this exact pose, but all the elements off the pose are taken from pieces of the actual sprites, redrawn to be a complete pic. Since I had the sprite to go by for reference, I decided to try and shade the piece using it as a guide and that turned out pretty good too. Once I"d done that, I had to shade the whole pic because otherwise it would look weird. And I"m extremely pleased with the results. I had to make some guesses with Barbara, because her sprite isn"t lit from the same direction that the toad is. As a result, it"s not as good as I feel it could be, but it still looks pretty good. I"ll take it.